Gandi's Private Domain Registration: Hiding your whois info

Because we care about protecting the privacy of your personal information, Gandi offers Private Domain Registration for individual-type accounts when possible.

This service allows you to hide most of your personal information from the public Whois database, with the goal of providing increased protection against automated processes which scrape people's personal information from public databases in order to spam them.

Activating or deactivating Private Domain Registration

  1. Log in to your Gandi account
  2. Click on the “Account management” tab
  3. Click the “Update your account information” sub-tab (direct link)
  4. Scroll down to “Private Domain Registration” and select “yes” or “no” as desired.
  5. Click Submit.

Your change should be reflected in the Whois right away.

Conditions and exceptions

This service does not hide your name

Your first and last name will not (usually) be hidden in the Whois, unless it is hidden by the corresponding Registry's policy. Due to current ICANN rules, this is very important, as it assures that you maintain all the owner rights to the domain (as well as the responsibilities).

It is only possible to use our private domain registration service for a domain's contacts if you fulfill all of the conditions below:

The extension must allow registrant info to be hidden

For some extensions, whois information is managed by the registry (.eu domains, for example).

For more on this, please see this page.

The domain must be locked against transfer

Contact information will be publicly visible when the handle is linked to a domain name that is about to be transferred to another registrar. This is to prevent unauthorized transfers and is not limited to Gandi.

The handle must have private domain registration activated

Remember, this is a handle-based privacy option. It is not domain-based. Therefore, if your domain has 4 different handles, and you only activate private domain registration on one handle, the other three will continue to display the full information.

See also

Last modified: 04/19/2018 at 20:47 by Arthur C. (Gandi)